We’re still a long way to go before everything is ready for this epic cutscene, but Fred is working as fast as he can! Here’s another animation, featuring the dragon as it wakes up (gasp!):

While Fred is busy animating stuff for the flashback cutscene with Charlotte and the dragon, Teddy has jumped into creating a new and improved version of the translation tool, that will work with Steam workshop! This means you awesome translators out there no longer have to go through the hassle of zipping and uploading stuff to the forums every time there’s a tiny update.

Also, once the tool is finished, we’ll implement a way to browse translations directly through the game, so this should make things a lot easier for those wanting to use the translations as well.

As for Vilya, she actually went away on a riding camp last week, but she was kind enough to prepare a bunch of portraits for this post, which were also posted on her blog while she was gone:

The first are variations of the Evergrind Arena receptionist, which will appear in other areas where it makes sense to have a front desk manager (though they will probably be regular NPCs and not host a set of challenges like the original receptionist)!

Second row is a bunch of people from the time travel area, and the last one (with text box added for effect) is the portrait of a mini-boss that will appear later on!

Last week we sent Fred off to RSM, a Swedish retro gaming convention which we had been invited to some time back. The convention took place last Saturday, and it was a blast! A lot of people came to play the game, and for anyone who likes retro games in general the convention was an awesome experience:

Back home, Vilya and Teddy kept on working as usual. Over the weekend Teddy has been focusing on getting the translation tool polished enough for some public testing. When we first mentioned it, way back when, we didn’t really plan on releasing it until the game was done. However, due to increased interest in translations, we’ve decided to put it earlier so people can translate the game as we keep working on it. Tools need beta testing as well, after all!

The translation tools will, for most people, consist of three different tools. The first one is for translating regular text, which is basically anything from “HP” to spell descriptions.

Another takes care of dialogues, which are more advanced than regular texts for various reasons. The most important one for translators is that parts of every line can be different depending on if the character is speaking to a boy or a girl, or whether the game is being played in co-op and so forth.

The final tool is a simple file merger, which will let you merge two localization files into one. This is useful if more than one person is working on the same translation, since you can work on one part each and then easily merge the files to create the full translation!

This is how it will work for most languages. For translations into languages that have a huge number of written characters, like Chinese, Korean and Japanese, there’s a bit more work involved, but we’ll delve deeper into that when the tools are actually made available later this week!

Vilya, in the meanwhile, has kept working on a bunch of portraits (as usual):

Next up is a revamped portrait of Marino in order to have him match his new sprite!

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)

But wait, you say, it’s not Friday today… No, indeed, here in Sweden it’s currently Monday evening, and as we already mentioned over at Facebook and Google+ last week (sadly, we forgot about Twitter..), we are rescheduling our future updates to Mondays from now on.

The reason is simply that we have changed our workflow and made stricter schedules for each of us, listing the tasks we need to do each week. Since we all enjoy working on the game during the weekends we also thought Mondays would be a better time to show the progress. That way we can show the tasks we finished during our scheduled week, including the things we saved for the weekend!

Anyway, let’s forget about that now and focus on what’s important: the update!

This week, Vilya spent making another zone, the east outskirts of the city. There’s a mysterious pond, a river and a house you won’t reach just yet.. ;3

To make the environment look better, and to avoid people getting hidden behind trees too often, we decided to create bushes to scatter around the areas. These will replace most of the random trees standing in the middle of any area so you won’t get caught by a naughty enemy hiding behind them.

Fred has been really busy this week. So busy, that he managed to complete all the tasks for next week, this week! Wooho!
Walk animations for a bunch of different NPCs was one of the tasks this week, so here’s a few of them in action paired together with some updated portraits by Vilya!

Writing and reading dialogues in XML-format was becoming quite impractical, especially for the artists. When the implementation workload let up a bit, Teddy whipped up a simple tool that made the process much less painful! The tool is made in good old C#/Winforms.

Next week: Being dead and waiting for revival in a multiplayer game is no fun. We’ll look into ways of making death (or being dead) a bit less boring!